According to the dictionary, φύειν means to grow, to make grow.11 But what does growing mean? Does it just mean to increase by acquiring bulk, to become more numerous and bigger?
Φύσις as emergence can be experienced everywhere: for example, in processes in the heavens (the rising of the sun), in the surging of the sea, in the growth of plants, in the coming forth of animals and human beings from the womb. But φύσις, the emerging sway, is not synonymous with these processes, which still today we count as part of “nature.” This emerging and standing-out-in-itself-from-itself may not be taken as just one process among others that we observe in beings. Φύσις is Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable.
It was not in natural processes that the Greeks first experienced what φύσις is, but the other way around: on the basis of a fundamental experience of Being in poetry and thought, what they had to call φύσις disclosed itself to them. Only on the basis of this disclosure could they then take a look at nature in the narrower sense. Thus, φύσις originally means both heaven and earth, both the stone and the plant, both the animal and the human, and human history as the work of humans and gods; and finally and first of all, it means the gods who themselves [12|17] stand under destiny. Φύσις means the emerging sway, and the endurance over which it thoroughly holds sway. This emerging, abiding sway includes both “becoming” as well as “Being” in the narrower sense of fixed continuity. Φύσις is the event of standing forth, arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.12
11. The noun φύσις corresponds to the verb φύειν.
12. “Φύσις ist das Ent-stehen, aus dem Verborgenen sich heraus- und dieses so erst in den Stand bringen.” Heidegger is playing on the etymological connection between Entstehen (genesis, growth) and Stand (a stand, state, situation, condition). The phrase in den Stand bringen ordinarily means to enable.